It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Detective Sergeant Tom Brant (Jason Statham) is a hard cop in southeast London willing take anything including a hockey stick to the bad guys. Cops are being targeted. Sergeant Porter Nash (Paddy Considine) is brought in to head the manhunt. He's ridiculed for being gay but finds a supporter in Brant. The killer makes reporter Dunlop (David Morrissey) his contact. Brant and Nash zero in on Barry "Blitz" Weiss (Aidan Gillen) as their suspect. Brant remembers a run-in with him a year ago.This is a hard-boiled cop drama. This wants to be a gritty harsh movie. It does come off as another modern grim British TV cop show with bigger actors. Considine fits right in. Statham seems to be itching to be the Transporter. It wouldn't hurt him to play slightly against type especially in a movie which wants to be taken more seriously. I like the grim tone but Statham may be at cross-purposes.

This film has no intelligence, no originality and is a complete joke. It's embarrassing to watch quite frankly.Paddy Considine and Aiden Gillen (both seriously talented actors) are wasted.Jason Statham has all the menace of a Magnum 44 made of Ice Cream - and the lines he delivers are made of first class Oak.This film actually depressed and annoyed me because people are spending serious money on making this dross- to attempt to pander to the voyeuristic and sadistic within us all - and making a joke out of it. It is neither exciting, clever, thought-provoking or moving in any respect.If you want to watch something violent which is intelligent and creative (i.e. not third-division)- then watch "Dead Man's Shoes", and see Paddy Considine in action as the revengeful ex-army assassin.

Good acting from consedine and believe it or not statham but the script is what let the film down. The film type cast of statham is painful to the point where there is not even any major character development you just have to go with he's the rough guy with a good Hart routine as per usual. Paddy consedine plays a good gay man with a dark side but the character is just a abusing the stereotype that a gay men are all clean tidy people who don't get there hands dirty as they make such a big deal of him being gay and getting his hands dirty, shown by a monologue into his past cases and the final reveal that he has helped stathams character kill the serial killer. Overall enough of a story to keep you entertained but not enough to re watch or recommend particularly. MR MH

Let's get one thing straight; Jason Statham is the bad guy in this movie.Statham is a hybrid good-guy/bad-guy, but he isn't your likable criminal, a la Porter in Payback; he's a bad cop - a really bad one. He steals from merchants, physically attacks suspects and witnesses while causing SERIOUS bodily harm, barges into private residences without warrants to search and stare-down the occupants, and intimidates the good-guys in internal affairs who actually try to protect the people. Statham's character is exactly the kind of thug psychologists talk about when they say cops and gangsters often share the same psychological profile. He's the worst type of criminal - the kind that exploits a position of power and authority to abuse the helpless - and this movie expects the viewer to empathize with him: impossible.Sure, there's a guy out killing cops that the movie tries to build up as its villain, but this killer was CREATED by Statham's police brutality and the system's unwillingness to bring him to justice. The killer got the idea to kill cops after being beaten half to death in a bar by Statham's character - for a misdemeanor. Statham and other officers literally play the tape back at the station to laugh at Statham's egregious physical abuse of a civilian. If cops are allowed to act like thugs (aka, Jason Statham's character), the murderer starts to look somewhat like a misguided victim of circumstance, or even an anti-hero. He cannot get justice through the legal channels, so, rather than live in fear of future attacks from Statham's character, he takes matters into his own hands.Aiden Gillen's villain/victim is a character with a complex psychological background, a cause that is just in principle (though horribly unjust in execution), and with circumstances that are interesting enough to warrant a camera on his activities. The murderer deserves to be the main character, and he would be if this were a decent movie. Instead, the film remains an amalgam of cop and action movie, with a subtext of condoning extreme police misconduct.Statham's supporting cast acts a little predictably and wooden, and are difficult to empathize with, one-dimensional, and unlikable. This has much more to do with the writing than the actors themselves, but it is definitely a major impediment to the movie's development. One fellow officer berates a man on her first date for saying he'll call, but not telling her EXACTLY when (she accuses him of intentionally keeping her waiting). Another officer unnecessarily chews-out this same beau for dropping her off at home, but not walking her to the door, even as the beau shows up to make sure she's all right. Other scenes add nothing to the movie but filler. A few scenes are entirely unbelievable, such as when a man has a 2-minute death scuffle with an assailant in his apartment, then is beaten to death with a hammer, and none of his neighbors hears. Still, production quality, Jason Statham's action sequences, and the performance of Aiden Gillen bring this stinker up to a 4/10.